Disney Wants Its New Kart Racer To Provide A "Fair" Free-To-Play Experience

As long as upgrading doesn’t make to much of a difference, I couldn’t care less.

I still against F2P practice.

@Fizza

sounds like typical ftp nature, nearly all of em let you unlock some content for free. just very, very slowly

wont be surprised if theres still unlocks that slightly boost your drivers stats of something, but minimal enough so they can say its not a big advantage

“they can also purchase in-game currency to progress in the game a little faster.”

Translation: Our game is pay to win with more steps.

Mmhmm. I'll believe it when I see it.

Kart is a genre Switch doesn't lack great content. Hope its good

Or just stay away from the currency going to upgrades fully and instead put your grubby fingers at skins (idk if that is planned) and emotes. I think that's more fair.

Sounds good, will be my first racing game since Mario Kart Wii. Can't beat the price and I don't mind actually (gasp) playing games to unlock things, it's part of the fun for me so I won't mind the paid aspects. If they were smart they'd structure the season pass to give you your in-game currency back like Fortnite, but it's Disney so I doubt that'll be the case. Either way I'll at least be trying it since you can't get buyers remorse with free.

If they have a good art design team, and an actual fun game, they can amass a lot of money just from skins alone if reasonably priced, but again..Disney...so..

I do not do free to play. They always end up hurting the game to pressure you into spending money.

I was not going to buy this game anyway after watching a few minutes of gameplay. The mainstream music was really off putting. No magic at all. The character select of Mickey said it all. This game is twisted. On one side he stood the way I love him and on the other side he seems to be some kinda gangster. Now that I learned it is a free to play game I am certainly not buying.

Reminds me too much of Chocobo GP. Luckily you don't have to pay in this case. And developers telling me when to play and how much to play for getting seasonal stuff is just bad. I am sorry for all the negativity, but this game makes me sad.

I do agree with Jhena how is it ftp if you have to pay ? Or if you don't want to pay you have to play the game constantly for 100 of hours just to unlock some stupid skin or something. I play when i want and for as much as i want.

High hopes for this game

but they can also purchase in-game currency to progress in the game a little faster.

(One of) the definition of Pay To Win. Yeah, I won't be playing this game. Ever.

I'm just glad that Disney is acknowledging Captain Jack Sparrow again with this and the recent 4K UHD remasters of the Pirates of the Caribbean films.
#JusticeForJohnnyDepp

I played the closed beta on Steam and had some good fun with it. The music on the tracks is all techno remixes of classic Disney songs, the track design was neat, and the the overall gameplay was smooth and fun. There was a decent amount of grind to get upgrade materials for characters, but I was able to win races for which I was about two levels under the recommended level. I am still very optimistic about it, but I do hope they tone down the grind a bit.

This game is being developed by Gameloft the company behind asphalt 9 legends, a game which started out free to play but over a very short period turned into one of the most predatory experiences in terms of pay to even compete. It's now impossible to play any special events without buying the monthly battle pass for ten/fifteen euro but then as soon as you buy that pass you basically just unlock a series of paywalls. The cost to unlock the 4 cars released in the past month was approx €800

Gameloft is an underling of Ubisoft as well so if you know anything about their dlc practices it might give an idea.

@sanderev aye in asphalt 9 last week it was POSSIBLE to unlock one of the cars for free if you done one race around 600 times, the race was around a minute long, boring af and no sane person done it to completion. Less than 400 people unlocked the car on the switch GLOBALLY.

@Stormcloudlive Dropped the game and happy i did but as the car your refering i did like 1000 or more races and unlocked 1 car. If you really don't want to pay for it no other way. Got everything that is possible for f2p player. You can get everything if you invest time instead of real money.

@SteamEngenius Just get Mario Kart 8, no chance of buyer's remorse since it's fantastic.

My time is more valuable than my money so I won't be wasting any on this game unless it's fantastic (or the kids spot it!)

@iaLgan the current special events that run in game are ALL locked behind requiring the car which is given as part of the battle pass which costs money each month and even after you gain access to the events they are just paywall after paywall to get near the special event car unlock (at the lowest rating available, it takes several hundred euro to star up the cars to where they're competitive) if you see Gameloft name on something, stay well clear. It's shocking to me that Disney gave this license to a company who effectively manages legal gambling in a 3+ rating game

Sooner or later they will release the gold edition of the game that includes everything, just like they did with Disney Infinity.

2 reasons to avoid. It's free to play and it's Disney. That should be more than enough to put off any sane person.

@Screen Yeah. The reality of these things is that if you can pay real money to unlock things "faster". When really that means the non-paying route certainly have been tuned to be slower to create a situation where players are tempted to pay.

I think the best measuring stick is Mario Kart 8 because it's a paid game with unlocks, so the pace of its unlocks legitimately will be cantered around a fun and fair pace. None of these "fair" F2P games will ever let you unlock content nearly as fast as MK8.

@HollowSpectre you do realize you are not losing anything by just downloading and playing the game right cause it's free

When gameplay incentives are involved and some people have more money than others, what is "fair"?

Well to be honest i liked the games like they used to be for example like let's say tekken 3 (just and example) you play you unlock characters etc. Now all there's left is buy dlc to have things that really should be already there. Strange but that's how it works these days

Yep you can unlock everything without paying. It may just take ten or so years at the pace you can go.

Gameloft made the excellent asphalt 9 and I played this game a lot and never put a dollar on it if they have a similar model on the Disney kart racer it will be just fine.

Shame to hear how much Asphalt 9 has gone down the drain. Loved playing it, spent a couple of bucks on it because I liked the game, but now every time I try to return it feels overwhelming.

I'm looking forward to it, although I sure won't be downloading it out the gate if it decides to launch in the second half of August (my internet availability takes an annual nosedive around the time).

@Stormcloudlive Yeah, if it was purely cosmetic I would've been somewhat okay with it. But "progressing faster" is pay to win, no matter how you twist it.

I'd rather pay € 30 for a decent kart game. Or even more if it's a good game.

There's no way this is true. With all of the cash-grabs Disney's been doing (Paid Fastpasses, That Mirrorverse Game, etc.), I highly doubt they'll let this not be pay-to-win. It's going to be like all of their mobile games: You can progress without paying money, but It takes you FOREVER. I'd rather pay $30 for a Disney Mario Kart rather than Free Download a game with stupid amounts of in-game purchases. You can end up spending WAY more than $60 if you're not careful.

I don't see why they would make this a free to play game in the first place. This looks like your typical 40-50 dollar kart racer in the same vein as the Nickelodeon kart racer series. Free to play is just opening a can of worms and is asking to get crucified.

Why not just sell the game in full for a flat fee. It’s a game licensed by one of the biggest media companies in the world I’m sure it’d sell just fine.

A free2play game will ALWAYS try to nudge you into paying money , which means the game experience won't be as good as it can be.
I'll definitely pass this one.

Good to hear, have been waiting on this since I tried the Steam beta. This formula of free to play works great for games like Fortnite. Will be interesting to see how it works here. Games like Asphalt 9 use a free to play model but put a hard cap on progression after maybe ten hours of play. So will be interesting to see what happens here.

@Mr_Horizon Fortnite does a good job in my opinion for a free to play FPS genre. Free to play racers haven't really been done well yet. We'll see where the pay wall does up here. Would be nice if the paywall stayed with optional cosmetics.

No, because it's Disney. 1) Their videogames aren't usually great, and 2) They've devolved into pure corporate bloat and dgad about making anything good.

@Dr_Lugae "Pokémon Shuffle" and the F2P version of "Team Kirby Clash" allow you to unlock things quickly.

@sanderev The idea is that progressing faster has no bearing in how well you can perform to win multiplayer races. Unless they're lying and actually have some kind of stat upgrades locked away behind the in-game currency, it doesn't really matter which characters and tracks you have unlocked when competitively racing against other players.

@Mr_Horizon Unless there are pop-up adds during the gameplay itself, I don't see how it hurts the game experience. It's easy to just ignore the micro-transaction menu and any reminders that appear outside of gameplay.

@BulbasaurusRex I mean that a f2p game needs to somehow make the money back. If you are lucky then selling cosmetic items is enough, and you are right: that's easy to ignore.

What I am afraid of is the stuff you see in mobile games, where you can either grind XP for an item, or just buy the XP.
Maybe you remember the drama about EAs Battlefront 2? A developer that needs to squeeze more money from a game might just nudge you to buy its XP packages via unreasonable grind requirements.
So I worry that a f2p game would be finetuned to "sell microtransactions", and not to "be as fun as possible".

@BulbasaurusRex Why are you defending this moneygrabbing idiocracy? Also in most racing games, you have stats defined by your racer and by the vehicle. Locking those behind paywalls, or making it really difficult to grind for them is a form of pay 2 win.

Progress means improvement. So yeah, this is pay to win.

I'd rather pay € 20 once for a game instead of 10000x €1 in pay to win trash. I will not be downloading this game.

@Mr_Horizon So grind the XP and ignore the nudging, and it doesn't hurt the experience one bit. Some will have excessive grinding requirements, but that's not fault of the F2P format itself, and there are also some where the grinding is tame.

@sanderev I'm only defending the ones that do it right and blatantly contradict your assessment that they only unlock things slowly when playing for free. It doesn't hurt anything to just try it and see how well or poorly the F2P format is used, and if it's one of the good ones, then I'd rather play it for free and completely ignore the micro-transactions than pay $20 for it.

Yes, most racing games have stats defined by the vehicles and racers, but if they're all balanced well enough so that there's no real advantage in picking something you unlock compared to a beginning set (as is implied by their statement), then it doesn't matter what you've unlocked from a competitive standpoint. The recent Mario Kart games themselves use this setup. So, no, progress does not necessarily mean improvement.

@BulbasaurusRex So you would rather play a game with around 1 hour of content for 2000 hours to get the same stuff someone who pays € 200 for the microtransactions? And you are even defending this moneygrabbing?

Also even playing F2P games gives these publisher the idea that it's okay to release F2P trash. So I will 100% refuse to play this trash.

Also every single F2P trash game is balanced so that people who buy the microtransactions or lootboxes have an unfair advantage over the free players. And seeing this is made by Gameloft, they are one of the worst companies for F2P games.

Do you have Disney stock?